National Geographic Special Collections: Archives & Film Preservation Blog

Bob Ballard, the Cayman Trough, the Galápagos Rift, and the Geographic Navy (1976-1979)

After the Mid-Atlantic Ridge expeditions in 1975, where the theory of plate tectonics was confirmed, Bob Ballard and the other scientists still had questions…With so much magma bubbling up, why were the rocks of the valley floor not hot? The heat had to be rapidly dissipating somehow, maybe through hot water springs called hydrothermal vents. Yet they had still not come across any.

Thus, in 1976 Bob Ballard and a National Geographic Society team, led by Emory Kristof, NGS photo engineer, boarded the research ship Knorr with its little submersible Alvin and set out to the Cayman Trough, a deep split 23,000 feet deep in the Caribbean Floor south of Jamaica that was tectonically active.  The goal of this expedition was to take Knorr and locate the valley and volcanic rift that were theorized to run across the Cayman Trough.  Using Knorr’s depth sounders, the valley was located 4 miles below the ocean’s surface. The crew lowered remote cameras on a tubular steel sled to take color photographs.  The first time the camera was brought to surface it didn’t bring pictures, but it brought back fresh volcanic rock proving recent volcanic activity on the seafloor.  The second time color photographs came back that were developed in a special van on Knorr’s afterdeck by NGS photographer, Pete Petrone.  “The pictures revealed much of interest about the terrain far below us.  Although it was similar in many ways to the volcanic central rift of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, several differences existed.  The lava pillows were larger and more uniform in size.  The terrain of the floor was flatter. Cutting across it, however, were the familiar signs of crustal separation:  deep fissures dividing the lava features, as one part of the valley floor is carried west with the American plate the rest east with the Caribbean plate.” (NGM Aug 1976:  237). While they were there, they also experienced a series of severe earthquakes and witnessed the tectonic activity of the plates first hand.

While Petrone developed photos in the van, Kristof and Al Chandler, also an engineer, constructed a camera that was placed on the deep sea floor by one of Alvin’s mechanical arms and could be remotely triggered.  "By improving the photographic process, the Geographic team contributed to timelier and less costly science, and their dramatic pictures helped enliven the magazine. But all this was prelude. The improved processes introduced by Kristof and his team would be crucial in what must be reckoned one of the great voyages of oceanographic discovery.” (https://nglibrary.ngs.org/geopedia/cameras-four)

Then in 1977, Ballard and the “Geographic Navy” (as they were known) made their first trip to the Galápagos Rift.  It was there that photos from Alvin revealed four vent sites that were crawling with life: clams, mussels, crabs, sea anemones, fish, octopuses, ghastly-looking giant tube worms, and those otherworldly dandelions.  Ballard and his colleagues had discovered biological communities entirely new to science. The food chain here did not ultimately depend on photosynthesis, like every other one ever known, but rather on hydrogen sulfide emitted in clouds from the vents, clouds that supported bacteria, which in turn supported the rest of the animals. This food chain was dependent on the fiery energies of the planet’s core rather than the fiery energies of the sun.

When the expedition finally returned to port, it brought samples of the strange life that Alvin had gathered. Since there was so little preserving fluid onboard, the samples were packed in Tupperware, soup tureens, and roasting pots from the galley, and temporarily embalmed in duty-free Russian vodka bought in Panama.  (https://nglibrary.ngs.org/geopedia/galapagos-rift)

In 1979, Ballard and team returned to the Galápagos Rift to closer examine the marine life surrounding the hydrothermal vents.  This time Alvin was outfitted with an innovative miniature television camera, provided by the Society, complete with zoom lens and enough lights that Kristof said it was like taking a television studio to the bottom of the sea. 

This small television camera obtained the clearest pictures, including stunning close-ups never before made of this strange new biology.  

The Television Special, "Dive to the Edge of Creation," was broadcast in January 1980 and won an Emmy. (The clip above is from the intro to the Special.)

In the clip below, you see Ballard and a crew member aboard Alvin investigating the hydrothermal vents...and you can see the television camera in action…

For more information on the Cayman Trough and Galápagos Rift expeditions, please read:

"Window on Earth's Interior" by Robert D. Ballard in the August 1974 issue of NGM

"Oases of Life in the Cold Abyss" by John B. Corliss and Robert D. Ballard in the October 1977 issue of NGM

"Return to Oases of the Deep" by Robert D. Ballard and J. Frederick Grassle in the November 1979 issue of NGM